


The Close of Years Now Past

by Who Shot AR (akerwis)



Category: The Mummy Series
Genre: Canonical Minor Character Death, Childhood, Christmas, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Siblings, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 18:38:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2822180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/pseuds/Who%20Shot%20AR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four Decembers in the Carnahan(-O'Connell) household.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Close of Years Now Past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mtgat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtgat/gifts).



_December, 1904_  
  
Evy's favorite part of Christmas was waiting for Jonathan to come home. She could hardly remember a time when he _wasn't_ at school for most of the year; when he'd first gone away at eleven, she'd been only three, blissfully unconcerned with the comings and goings of nearly anyone. It was easy enough to forget about Jonathan in favor of adventures, both small and large, in her own life. (Since _she_ hadn't a boarding school to attend, there was no reason for her to stay in England while Mother and Father sailed away to Egypt. Jonathan was, apparently, quite jealous of her good fortune. Being three, she hadn't had much to say about his sulking at being left out of the family's travels for the first time.)  
  
Now, she counted down the days until they'd go to the train station to get him. It was even harder than waiting for Father Christmas to come, because she'd get to _see_ Jonathan. They'd go sledding, provided it snowed, and make toasted cheese in the fireplace, and she'd let him have her share of plum pudding, because there was nothing good about plum pudding that Evy could see. He let her come with him nearly everywhere, and he usually didn't get tired of being asked questions.  
  
Finally, _finally_ , the day came that Father said over breakfast, "Finish your lessons quickly, Evy--Jonathan's train comes at half one."  
  
What she wanted to do was jump up and down all around the room, shouting _Jonathan's coming! Jonathan's coming!_ What she did, since she was a grown-up girl of seven, was nod vigorously and promise she would do just that. If her hieratic was less neat than usual, or her arithmetic slightly off, neither Mother nor Father commented on the fact. (Secretly, Evy suspected they were excited, too. Jonathan didn't write many letters home; sometimes it was months before they heard from him again. One term, he didn't write to them at all.)  
  
The ride to the station felt unending, and so did waiting for Jonathan's train to finally appear in the distance. The station was crawling with people, mostly other families retrieving wayward schoolchildren and Oxford schoolboys and girls waiting to be taken away to wherever their own families lived. After an eternity of looking for familiar faces, Evy spotted him and shouted out, "Jonathan! Jonathan, we're here!"  
  
He came over, walking annoyingly slow in the sort of way that clearly meant _being fifteen makes me very mature_ , but once he'd joined them, he picked Evy up and whirled her around in the air. She laughed, kissing him on the cheek before he let her down again, and refused to let go of his hand the entire way home.

•

Ice skating was one of Evy's newest hobbies that season; one of Jonathan's old pairs of skates fit her decently with some newspaper shoved into the toes, and both Mother and Father had hinted that perhaps there might be a new pair, entirely hers, waiting on Christmas morning.

Naturally, it was the first thing she suggested when Jonathan asked her what she wanted to do before tea.

"Skating?" he asked, eyes wide with mock surprise. "You don't like ice skating, do you, Evy?"

Evy bounced on her heels. " _Please_ , Jonathan?"

"All right. Good thing I packed my skates, isn't it?" He grinned at her. "I was thinking of leaving them at school, you know."

"You were not," Evy said, rushing off to find her mittens. "I _told_ you to bring them!"

When they started down from the house to the pond, skates slung over their shoulders, it was a bit warmer out than it had been earlier in the week. Evy was perfectly happy about it; it got much too cold and wet in Oxford's winters, so far as she was concerned. Once Christmas was over and Jonathan went back to school, she and Father and Mother would board a ship back to Cairo, and the weather would be much more agreeable.

"Did you get Mother and Father presents?" she asked as they neared the pond. There was a little stone bench near its edge, mostly for watching the water during nicer months. No one used it in winter except to lace up their skates.

"Course I did." Jonathan turned a bright grin towards her. "I _might_ have gotten a certain younger sister something, too."

Evy grinned back, then bent her head to her skates. If she didn't pay close attention to her laces, she always ended up with knots where she meant to tie them up in a bow. "Maybe I didn't get you _anything_."

"Nothing at all? I'm shocked, baby sister. Truly hurt." Jonathan nudged her side with his elbow, and she did the same in answer. "Maybe I'll have to keep your gift for myself, then."

"Maybe I got you _something_ ," she amended, a laugh escaping her. "You'll see on Christmas. Ready?"

"Go on," Jonathan answered, his attention caught by the tangled laces of his own skates. "I'll be out there in a minute or two."

She wasn't about to sit and wait when she could be moving across the ice in long, only slightly wobbly lines. Especially not if Jonathan didn't mind her mincing over to the pond's edge and stepping out onto its surface. It was still fairly smooth, even though she'd already been out skating twice earlier in the week, and after an unsteady moment or two, she was gliding away, her arms spread out to steady her.

As she approached the far end, she heard--and felt--a low, hard crack beneath her. She froze.

"Jonathan!" she shouted, her heartbeat hard and fast in her throat. When she glanced down, water was pooling around her skates. "Jonathan!"

"Be patient, Evy, I'm--" he called back, but if he said anything after that, she missed it in the clatter and splash of broken ice.

The sheer cold of the water knocked the thoughts out of her head. For a moment, she felt entirely animal, rushing down towards the bottom of the pond, staring with shocked, still-open eyes at the murky nothingness pressing in around her. She kicked her feet, or tried, but they didn't seem to want to move. In her panic, she gulped at the water, losing her breath and gaining a lungful of water in one fell swoop.

The water carried her back up to the surface, aided by her futile attempts at paddling towards the ragged hole above her. When her head bobbed up above the surface, she coughed and sputtered and dragged the cold air into her lungs, trying to squeak out another _Jonathan_. It came out like a whisper. Everything was so _cold_ ; it felt as though the breath was pressed from her chest as soon as she managed to inhale.

"I'm right here!" And so he was. Lying flat on his stomach, eyes wide, reaching out towards her--and her arms felt like they were tied with weights. She pushed a freezing hand up to the surface of the ice, the wool of her wet mitten sticking to it. Jonathan grabbed and pulled, and she wondered if this meant she was going to die like Little Nell did, before she ever got to do anything important.

The next few minutes blurred together. She flopped onto the ice like a caught fish and, through the cold and coughing, was aware on some level of being pulled away from the hole in the ice, picked up, and thrown over her brother's shoulders like a sack of flour. The pond grew smaller and smaller as Jonathan ran back up towards their house. In the snow next to the bench, she saw a little spot of black.

"Your ice skates," she tried to say, but a cough cut her off in the middle of the second word.

Jonathan answered in a tight, serious voice she'd never heard from him before. "Shush, Evy, we're almost there."

The cook yelped the moment she saw them burst into the kitchen and, after a moment's shock, ran off to find Mother. Evy's teeth chattered out of time with the shivers in the rest of her body; when Jonathan set her down in a chair next to the kitchen fire, she mumbled, "My fingers hurt."

Not _hurt_ , exactly--well, actually, yes, they hurt a lot, but they also felt like they were expanding somehow, and prickling miserably. Trying to explain was more effort than she could draw up at the moment.

"I know, I know," he answered in that same strange voice, pulling her mittens from her hands and cupping them in his, blowing a warm breath over them. It didn't help much, but she could feel it even through the way every part of her seemed to be trembling. When he let go and started wrestling with the water-swollen laces of her skates, she balled up her fingers. They felt so small and icy again when they were pressed up against her palms. "We'll get you dried off and warmed up--you just--"

She could hear her mother's shoes clacking down the steps much more quickly than usual. She came into the room in a burst of perfume and crepe, saying something in Arabic that Evy didn't understand. Something naughty, probably. It was always possible to tell Mother was swearing if she spoke in a language other than English and refused to translate. Sometimes Evy could sound the words out and look them up later, but she felt too thick-headed and frozen to try.

Mother began unbuttoning Evy's coat, handing the soaked wool to the cook. Jonathan backed out of the way, saying something about making sure Evy's room was warm.

Evy found herself pulled out of her wet clothes, wrapped up in one of Mother's shawls, and carried up to her bed, where Jonathan had stoked a fire into a bright roaring burst and drawn back the covers of her bed. It hardly seemed she'd blinked before she was curled up under a heaping pile of blankets--several of which had been pulled from other beds--in her warmest nightgown, with two pairs of socks on her feet. Mother kissed her head and went to find something warm for her to drink.

"I'm not going to die, am I?" she asked, once she thought Mother must be out of earshot. It wasn't fair to worry her.

" _Die_?" For a moment, Jonathan looked stricken, his mouth hanging open. And then he laughed, reaching out to muss her still damp, still horribly cold hair. "Course not. Did you miss the part where I outwitted the Grim Reaper at his own game?"

"Yes." Evy smiled back at him, flexing her fingers experimentally. They were beginning to warm a bit. "Jonathan?"

"Hmm?"

"I'm never going skating again."

❧

  
  
_December, 1910_  
  
"Mother's going to be cross if you don't hurry up," Evy said, poking her head into Jonathan's bedroom. He was standing before his mirror, combing and recombing his hair with narrowed eyes. "We're going to be late for the party."  
  
"Bet _you'd_ be disappointed about that." Jonathan laughed, meeting her gaze in the mirror. "She didn't fall for your upset stomach, did she?"  
  
Evy sighed. Slipping through the doorway, she closed the door quietly behind her and sat down at the edge of his bed without much thought to wrinkling her skirts. If Jonathan was going to turn the subject to her, she didn't want their parents listening in. "I still don't see why I have to go. I _hate_ parties."  
  
"You, baby sister, need to learn to have fun. You can't spend your whole life perfecting your _sneaking way of getting behind curtains_."  
  
" _Wicked and cruel boy_ ," she answered in kind, her lips turning up. Perhaps three enraptured letters about _Jane Eyre_ had been a bit many--but knowing Jonathan had remembered (and clearly skimmed the book for quotations to throw at her over the holidays) got a smile from her. " _You are like the Roman emperors_."  
  
"I hope so. The Roman emperors enjoyed the hell out of themselves."  
  
Evy glanced around Jonathan's bedroom, the one he only occasionally came back to now. Ostensibly, he lived at home during term, making his way from the manor to the university and back again. In practice...well, it was hard to know with certainty, since she was at school and Mother and Father were often in Egypt, but she'd heard Mother saying something about Jonathan spending more time on friends' settees than in his own home. (And then she'd been discovered and chastised for eavesdropping, which was horribly unfair but not entirely unjustified.)  
  
He'd stayed around now that Evy was home, though. Even when he went out with his friends and came home late, reeking of smoke and scotch, he always found his way back; sometimes she was still awake, poring over a stack of books in bed, when he returned. He always stuck his head in her room if her lamp was lighted. In the morning, provided he was given plenty of time to sleep off the lingering effects of the night before, he was always willing to indulge Evy's whims.  
  
"Do you think," she asked slowly, picking at the cuff of her dress, "you could convince Mother and Father to let me stay here?"  
  
He paused mid-comb and turned around. Evy shifted under the weight of his frown; she hadn't meant for him to turn his attention _that_ strongly towards her.  
  
"Listen," he said, reaching out to stop her fingers from unraveling the lace at her wrist. "It's not going to be so bad."  
  
"I don't want to go." She stared determinedly at the floor until she felt his knuckles under her chin, lifting her gaze back up from her shoes. It was code, an unspoken way of saying _don't be so shy, Evy, everything will be fine_.  
  
"I know. But it'll be a few hours, and then you don't have to go to another party again for _months_."  
  
He was right--but she'd still have to go and call on people with Mother. And when she went back to school, she'd spend all her time with her schoolmates, so many of whom regarded Latin as a chore, death rites and rituals as horrid dinner conversation, and Egypt as a dusty, unimaginable place filled with sheikhs and savages. She was too clumsy for field hockey; too impatient for cooking _or_ maths (though the latter was less trying than the former); and whenever she tried to sew, she always ended up pricking her fingers.  
  
Some of the other girls were friendly, of course, and she did have friends--but occasionally, she felt singularly, overpoweringly lonely in ways thirteen-year-old girls excelled at. Coming home and having to do more of the same sorts of socializing, when all she really wanted was to hide in her room and read, was more disagreeable than she thought Jonathan could understand. He _loved_ going to parties. He especially, she was beginning to notice, loved going to parties with plenty of wine.  
  
Jonathan looked at her expectantly, waiting for some kind of response other than petulant silence. Evy sighed, leaning forward a little, and said, "Fine. But you have to hurry up."  
  
He leaned forward, too, pressing his forehead to hers, and crossed his eyes. There was no way to look at him and keep from laughing, so she didn't even bother to try. Apparently satisfied by the sound, Jonathan stood and said, "All right, chop chop. We've got a party to yawn through."

❧

  
  
_December, 1923_  
  
Father and Mother were dead, to begin with--and had been for nearly a year. It still didn't feel real to Evy. They spent so much time away from England that, despite the funeral and the obituary in the Times, despite the reporters ringing the house to ask about curses and King Tutankhamen, she occasionally caught herself expecting to hear from them. A telegram at the door, a postcard with battered edges. _Home soon, Evy. Ensuring the tomb isn't disturbed whilst we're away. The papers had it wrong--different aeroplane, different couple, different curse. Entirely different set of grieving children._  
  
She'd spent the last few months covering tables and settees with old sheets and locking unneeded rooms away. Dozens of drawing rooms, spare bedrooms, and vestibules had been silly when the house was occupied by four people who spent half the year abroad; now that the number had been cut in half, it was verging on the absurd. Only the truly necessary rooms still remained open: her bedroom, Jonathan's bedroom, the kitchen, the library. What was the point of the others? Perhaps the billiards room, for Jonathan's sake, but she rarely ventured beyond her desk and its stacks of doctorate research.  
  
Her life had shrunk to the university, the research she completed outside it, and the occasional demand for attention from her cat. It was a well-trodden path she followed, one from which she didn't have the desire--or, really, the time--to deviate. The best she managed as a distraction was worrying over the family coffers. While there had been money left to her and to Jonathan, enough for a yearly stipend each, most of her parents' wealth had gone to Cairo's Museum of Antiquities; Jonathan had single-handedly managed to drain all of his three hundred pounds for the year, and a good portion of hers.  
  
One afternoon, halfway through the month, she gave up on real work for the day and pulled out a well-worn copy of _The Moonstone_. Little could be as satisfying as the chase for a legendary diamond on a day that practically dripped fog. Revisiting books she loved always made Evy feel a little less lonely in the world. They were proof she wasn't the only person who thought and felt as she did.  
  
_Now the Diamond could never have been in our house, where it was lost, if it had not been made a present of to my lady's daughter; and my lady's daughter would never have been in existence to have the present, if it had not been for my lady who (with pain and travail) produced her into the world. Consequently..._  
  
Consequently, she heard a door bang open elsewhere in the house and a shout of invective that really didn't need to be voiced, let alone repeated. She was on her feet in an instant, dropping her volume of Collins unceremoniously on the floor, and running out to meet Jonathan.  
  
He was haggard from travel, two fat suitcases sitting at his feet like satisfied dogs, and shaking the hand he'd apparently pinched in the door. Evy launched herself at him like she was still nine years old and hugged the living daylights out of him, pressing her face close to the linen of his shirt.  
  
Jonathan didn't say anything, only hugged her back as hard. Touching someone else--someone who understood, no less--soothed some of her heartache. She wondered how lonely Jonathan had been this year, valiantly continuing Father's catalogue of the artifacts they'd found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and running up even more impressive gambling debts than usual.  
  
"See you're holding down the fort," he said, glancing around the corridor. Most of the doors leading off it were shut tight; everything left was neatly kept, though, and the warm glow of the library's lamps spilled out past the room's threshold. That bit was welcoming, at least. "They'd be proud, you know."  
  
Evy bit down on her lip. Father had grown up in this house, just as she and Jonathan (much of the time) had. Mother had loved it equally, despite her rather shorter history with it and had decorated liberally with treasures she'd acquired before she and Father met. And she'd closed all of it up. _Proud_ didn't seem like the right word for how she'd lived this last year, curling ever more in on herself and her studies in her grief.  
  
"How was Cairo?" she asked, bending down for Jonathan's luggage. It weighed more than she expected; did he bring back stones with him?  
  
"Rotten. Utterly rotten. Raining when I left." He let her lead the way back to his room, walking at her side easily. It was as though nothing had happened, for a moment or two, and then it crashed down again. If things were really as they were, it wouldn't be the pair of them alone in a sprawling estate, walking through the paneled hallways they were both too young to own.  
  
"Really?"  
  
"No, it was perfect weather. Didn't want you to be jealous, stuck here in your ivory tower."  
  
"I would be anyway," she muttered, sidling into his room and setting the suitcases down again. Jonathan sat down heavily on the bed. Evy joined him. She was half-tempted to paw through his suitcases in search of what was weighing them down so heavily, but with Jonathan, one could never be sure one wanted to know the answer.  
  
"No need to be now," he told her, ruffling her hair. Evy shook his hand off, a tiny smile beginning to show on her face. "I'm stuck here 'til the new year at the earliest. Just think how miserable we'll be."  
  
It was the nicest idea Evy had heard since the funeral.

❧

  
  
_December, 1926_  
  
Jonathan had never found much of interest in children. As a general rule, any creature too young to play poker was a creature worth ignoring. Worse yet were those too young to speak, walk, or do much more than lie in place and wail. Damned rude to (occasionally) respectable gentlemen nursing hangovers, hardly worth the fuss they kicked up.  
  
As Christmas drew nearer, however, he found himself reexamining that position.  
  
There was something to be said, after all, for children's mothers--or, as the case might be, mothers-to-be. Especially when one of them happened to be his sister, who'd breathlessly informed him in May that she and Rick were going to be married and that it would be sooner rather than later.  
  
"Oh, good," he'd answered cheerfully, putting an arm around her shoulders. "I love weddings. Big party, lots to drink. So when is Mr. O'Connell making an honest man of himself?"  
  
Evy's gaze had grown shifty. She might have bravado enough to lie to other people, but Jonathan knew her too well to see past her attempts at hiding something. "Tomorrow, actually."  
  
For once, Jonathan hadn't had a smart reply. Even _in a week_ would have seemed more reasonable. Weren't there banns to be read? Forms to fill out? "Tomorrow?"  
  
"Yes." She'd looked up at him, her mouth set, as though daring him to question the wisdom of that choice. There were times when Evy hated to be questioned, and this clearly was one of them. Affairs of the heart were never her strong point; the potential for being teased for her amateurishness must have loomed large in her mind. "I've been making the arrangements. I know it's a bit... _soon_ , but--"  
  
It wasn't hard to put the pieces together. Well before they'd finished damning Imhotep back to his underworld, Evy had been taken with O'Connell; it was obvious by the time they'd begun their ill-fated trip up the Nile that she found him more handsome than she wanted to admit. They'd been inseparable since they'd saved the world--O'Connell had even helped her reorganize the library she'd nearly sent the way of Alexandria a few weeks back. It was only natural that there might be _results_ to all those evenings they'd disappeared back to Evy's flat and Jonathan steadfastly pretended he was oblivious to the entire song and dance.  
  
"I don't think it's a necessity, getting married," she'd told him over whiskey and water--whiskey for him and water for her. She did have a bit of a glow about her, as he thought on it; everything about her radiated shy pleasure in her plans for the future. "I...I didn't think I would, for a very long time."  
  
"But there's only room in the world for one bachelor Carnahan in the world." He grinned at her, speaking lightly. There was truth to the sentiment, though. Now that she had someone she could make eyes at--someone who wasn't a hero from a novel or worse, played by Douglas Fairbanks--it was obvious just how happy it made her. "Can't have you trying to steal my glory, old mum."  
  
That had made her laugh. It was an old nickname, one born of her incorrigible tendency to worry over him, but it carried new significance now.  
  
And things had turned out, so far. The pair of them had married, they'd all three taken a steamship back to Oxford, and Evy had set about fixing up the manor with a vengeance. She seemed to be under the impression that the entire place needed airing out and cleaning. Parts of it might, but since she was unlikely to allow the baby into the Limoges room any time soon, Jonathan sincerely doubted _all_ of it did. Nonetheless, shutters were thrown open and windows scrubbed, bits of china dusted and wood polished. Jonathan suspected she needed something to do with herself; if it hadn't been spring (rather, summer and autumn) cleaning, it would have been something else.  
  
O'Connell-- _Rick_ , he really would have to think of him as Rick now--took more easily than Jonathan expected to this sojourn in the Oxfordshire countryside. Maybe it was all the space on the estate for target practice that appealed. All the same, Jonathan had more than once walked into a room to find the O'Connells discussing some aspect of the future, often far from the estate. How long it would be before they could travel with the baby. Why a child could not, in fact, be called Anubis in the year 1926, and no, Helios was out, too.  
  
("Then so is John," Evy answered, rolling her eyes at Rick's previous suggestion. "Surely we can come up with something that isn't borne by every third man on the street."  
  
"Why?" asked Rick, his expression filled with genuine bafflement at the idea.)  
  
Sometimes Jonathan joined in, but more and more, he left them to their own devices, sorting out marriage and parenthood and what it would have to be for two people who had no desire to live out the rest of their lives in pure English domesticity. For that, they didn't need his contributions, and he had none to give.  
  
Jonathan was satisfied enough to see his sister happy--and good money made off those saddlebags full of treasure they'd brought home with.

**Author's Note:**

> The minute I read your letter way back at the start of Yuletide, I started getting ideas. It ended up expanding beyond "Evy and Jonathan as children," but I hope it proves mildly interesting all the same. Thank you for giving me the chance to write this, and I hope you have a very happy Yuletide. ♥


End file.
